Deadfall

by Linda Fairstein

  “Wildlife Conservation Society,” Mike said. “That’s WCS?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Where’s your car?”

  “Exactly where we left it last night. Do they have an office here?”

  “Sure they do,” I said. “When’s the last time you went to the zoo?”

  “Zoo?” Mike asked.

  “That’s the local home of the WCS,” I said, starting into the crosswalk when the light changed. “The Bronx Zoo, gentlemen. We’re going ape.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Why do we have to go overseas?” Mike asked as he showed his laminated NYPD pass going through the tollbooth on the Triborough Bridge, over the Hell Gate waterway.

  “Because the Wildlife Conservation Society is headquartered at the Bronx Zoo,” I said. “They work alongside Animals Without Borders—the one that honored Battaglia—because that group doesn’t have an office in New York.”

  “Good idea,” Mercer said.

  “Go to the source,” I added. “Isn’t that always the best way to get reliable information?”

  “Yeah,” Mercer agreed with me. “It beats a website. Maybe people in that organization can reconcile something like the DA’s membership in a hunt club with his conservation concerns.”

  “What’s wrong with the zoo in Central Park?” Mike asked.

  “It’s not the real deal,” I said. “That’s mostly a children’s zoo.”

  “It was good enough for you the first time you wanted to spend the night with me,” Mike said. “On the roof of the Arsenal.”

  We had been working a murder of a girl in the park’s rowboat lake. The rooftop of the Arsenal, overlooking the tiny zoo, had been magical—the backdrop for the dramatic change in my relationship with Mike.

  “I’m not complaining about it. Not that night, anyway,” I said. “It’s just that it’s only six acres within a huge park, versus the two hundred sixty-five acres in the Bronx. And it’s a menagerie. It’s not where the conservation efforts are centered.”

  “A menagerie?”

  “That’s what the Central Park Zoo was called when it was founded,” I said. “Eighteen fifty-nine. It was only for the exhibition of animals.”

  “We heard all this when we were scouring the park on the Bethesda angel murder,” Mercer said. “The zoo wasn’t even designed as part of the park.”

  “Yes,” I said. “At least two of us were listening. People just started donating exotic animals that they brought back from trips out west or abroad. Everything from swans and snakes to bear cubs.”

  “Then all those fancy buildings went up along Fifth Avenue—Vanderbilts and Astors and Fricks and Mellons,” Mercer said. “Millionaire’s Row.”

  “And the rich folk who moved uptown didn’t like the smell of the animals all that much,” I said. “So the creatures went from being housed in open enclosures to having some structures built to keep them off the city streets. But the real plan called for a zoological park—like the great ones of Europe. The only place left to build it, in the city, was in the wilderness.”

  Mercer laughed. “I guess that’s what the Bronx was, back in 1900. Wilderness.”

  “Did you come here to the zoo a lot growing up?” Mike asked.

  “Tons.”

  I had been raised in a suburb north of the city—in Harrison, a small village that was part of Westchester County. My parents, whom I adored, moved there after my father and his partner—both physicians—invented a plastic device that was used worldwide in most cardiac valve replacement surgery, even to this day. The small piece of tubing—the Cooper-Hoffman valve—funded educations for my two brothers and for me—first at Wellesley College, then at the University of Virginia School of Law.

  “Me too,” Mercer said. “I took the subway here every chance I got. What was your favorite thing to see?”

  We were driving on the Deegan Expressway, getting off at the exit near Yankee Stadium to wind across Fordham Road, past the bodegas and restaurants that specialized in chimichangas and burritos, in a neighborhood that was home to Jewish immigrants a century ago.

  “Gorillas,” I said. “The great apes. They seem so intelligent and, well—almost human. I could watch them all day. And you?”

  “Elephants,” Mercer said. “I’ve always loved those beasts. I hated to lose the Ringling Brothers circus, but how I despised the way those gentle giants were treated.”

  “Me, I’m a lions and tigers guy,” Mike said. “I used to have all these fantasies about going to live in the jungle.”

  “How Tarzan of you,” I said. “I never knew.”

  “But without Jane. No use for her.”

  “So glad you outgrew that phase.”

  “I’m working on it,” Mike said. “Did you know tiger stripes are like fingerprints?”

  “No.”

  “No two are alike. Each set of stripes is unique.”

  “I had no idea.”

  I needed a day like this. I felt like I was playing hooky with my two best friends from school, going to the coolest playground in the city of New York.

  “Book of common knowledge,” Mike said. “Kind of stuff you should know.”

  For the last couple of weeks, I had desperately wanted to regain my stability but had continued to struggle with my post-kidnapping PTSD.

  I’d always liked to settle down with a drink in the evening. But I had treated my taste for alcohol like an addiction lately. I despised the fog it created in my brain late at night, and hated, too, the way the hangovers compelled me to stay in bed the morning after.

  “Did you hear me, Coop?” Mike said.

  “Sorry. I’ve been daydreaming.”

  “I asked if you’ve thought this outing through.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “I like that,” Mike said, looking at me in his rearview mirror. I was stretched out across the backseat. “It’s totally in character with the old you.”

  I wanted to be that me again badly. I had been drawn into the Wolf Savage investigation in the most unlikely way, but it had jolted me back into doing what I did best.

  Paul Battaglia deserved a better ending than he got. We had been at sixes and sevens for months now, and he had long ago compromised my once-idealistic view of his integrity. But he had helped shape me into the prosecutor I was today, and the two best detectives I knew—Mike and Mercer—should not have been sidelined from solving the mystery of his murder.

  “I want us to break this case,” I said.

  “How’s that going to happen?” Mercer asked. “The old combo-platter solution? Intel from Vickee, surfing the Internet, and a whole lot of ESP?”

  “Look, guys,” I said, sitting up and leaning forward, “there’s nobody who knows more about this situation than we do, is there?”

  “You positioned yourself well for that one, Coop,” Mike said. “Between a rock and a hard place, for sure.”

  “I clearly wasn’t the target, because the shooter was such a marksman that if he’d intended to kill both Battaglia and me—or just me—he’d have taken another shot. Another perfect shot.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So I’m the key witness. The man was coming to see me,” I said. “And I’m supposed to know why that is.”

  “But you don’t,” Mike said.

  “But they think I do, so I figure I’m actually likely to know before they find out. I mean, that’s what they assigned me to do. We’ll have to break it before the task force does, is all.”

  “Is she making sense yet, Mercer?” Mike asked.

  “Slow and steady wins the race. She’ll get there.”

  Few people knew Battaglia as well as I did—the good, the bad, and the ugly. A dozen years by his side, handling his most sensitive cases and representing him in the community whenever he wanted to duck an appearance or not take the heat for
a criminal justice situation.

  “I was there for the Wildlife Conservation dinner,” I said. “I did the research for his remarks and helped write his acceptance speech.”

  My English lit major at Wellesley had put me squarely in the DA’s sights whenever he needed a ghost for his scripted public remarks.

  “I’ve known Prescott for years,” I said. “I’ve got a Skeeter-meter that lets me read him, courtesy of his ex-wife, and anticipate most of his moves.”

  “All good, Coop,” Mike said. “But Mercer’s right; we can’t just fly blind.”

  “I have no intention of doing that,” I said. “My brain is getting back in gear, okay?”

  “Sure—but—?”

  “How many people has Battaglia prosecuted—well, overseen the prosecutions of—in the last three decades?” I asked.

  “Hundreds of thousands,” Mike said, easing the car off Southern Boulevard and into the parking lot at the zoo.

  “Most of them misdemeanors,” I said. “Low-level crimes.”

  “Sure, but thousands of felonies every year, too.”

  “Not a Pablo Escobar among them,” I said. “No big cartel hotshot, killing off the narcos and cops and district attorneys, simply because the city’s Special Narcotics prosecutor handles all of those matters. Took them away from our office. From Battaglia.”

  “True.”

  “So follow my thinking for a minute, guys.”

  Mike turned off the motor and both men turned in their seats to look at me.

  “Here’s what we’ve got,” I said, ticking off a list on my fingers. “The Saint Hubertus Club. A Supreme Court justice who dies under somewhat suspicious circumstances. The district attorney—man of the year of Animals Without Borders.”

  “Operation Crash,” Mike said, “and the friction between US Attorney James Prescott and District Attorney Paul Battaglia. That’s your excuse for going off the reservation to play Sherlock with us.”

  “That’s if you really think I’m going to need an excuse, Detective,” I said. “Because at some point the man of the year switches uniforms and shows up at a Saint Hubertus retreat. A private hunting preserve. A meeting so secretive that no one even spills the beans that Battaglia was there—except for an anonymous caller.”

  “Lord, make his companion be a hooker,” Mike said. “It’ll be the perfect case.”

  “Fast-forward to the middle of his displeasure with me,” I said. “Last week, showing up for a face-off, backing me away from the Savage case. And then going ballistic—”

  “Bad choice of words,” Mercer said.

  “Stalking me, if you think that’s any more suitable language, to the Met Museum to confront me about having something to do with a friend of his who was also there,” I said. “Are you following my theme? Is it any surprise that what brings the great man down is a sharpshooter? A professional hunter of some sort who tracked a moving target and nailed it. That, I would suggest to you, has nothing to do with any disgruntled felon Battaglia has ever prosecuted.”

  Mercer cocked his head and nodded, putting the pieces together.

  “Don’t forget Diana,” Mike said.

  “Oh, I haven’t let that one slip, Detective. Skeeter Prescott charged me with figuring out who she is,” I said, “and he’s the last guy I want to let down.”

  Mike squinted and looked at me, clearly puzzled. “You got Diana?”

  “I think I do, gentlemen,” I said, sitting back on the rear seat. “Goddess of the hunt, guys. Roman mythology. Diana was goddess of the hunt—and wild animals.”

  “Now all we have to do”—Mike nodded as he spoke—“is figure out what human form this goddess takes.”

  FIFTEEN

  “Do you remember meeting any of these fellows back in the day?” Mercer asked.

  The three of us were standing in front of the magnificent Rainey gates—the bronze sculptures, oxidized now so that their patina was the same shade of green as the Statue of Liberty, that have been the iconic images of the entrance to the Bronx Zoo since the 1930s.

  “I do,” I said. “Isn’t that Sultan the lion, posing on top of the arches?”

  “My department,” Mike said. “A Barbary lion—a gift to the zoo just after 1900.”

  “What are Barbary lions?” I asked.

  “The largest in the subspecies,” Mike said. “North African. They were massive beasts, with really plush manes. They’re the lions that were brought to Rome to fight the gladiators in the Colosseum.”

  “Of course you would know that,” I said.

  “There was also a menagerie at the Tower of London,” Mike said. “They’ve actually dug up remains of Barbary lions at the tower going way back before Sultan took up residence here. Big, bold creatures, but extinct now.”

  “That’s the fate of too many of these animals,” Mercer said.

  The sculptor had captured the mane brilliantly—with layers and layers of waves worked into the bronze material.

  I walked beneath the gated archway—under the white-tailed deer and great hornbill, the penguin and pelican, the baboon and flamingo and trio of bears. All of them seemed to be resting on the shell of Buster, a three-hundred-year-old Galapagos tortoise. The handsome animals had drawn me into the zoo for as many years back as I could remember.

  “You know they posed for the sculptor?” Mike said.

  “C’mon.”

  “No kidding, Coop. Each of these animals was taken into one of the cages for his sitting. And Rainey was a big-game hunter,” he said. “He captured and brought some of the earliest animal specimens back here from Africa.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You remember this from childhood?”

  “He’s cheating,” Mercer said, slapping Mike on the back.

  “Where are we, Coop?” Mike asked.

  “How stupid of me,” I said. “This is the Fordham Road entrance to the zoo.”

  Mike had gone to Fordham University, which was a stone’s throw away.

  “It wasn’t that long ago that I could tell you the name of every animal in the whole place,” he said. “What they ate for breakfast and dinner, and what time they got fed. When I didn’t have the cash to dine out with my dates—no trust fund like you, kid—I’d bring my ladies here, for a hot dog and some peanuts.”

  “I bet it worked every time,” I said.

  “Pretty much so, as long as I stayed out of the reptile house,” Mike said. “There’s something about slithering pythons and constrictors. I used to think they’d make the broads want to wrap themselves around me once we got back to the dorm, but they were simply repulsive cold-blooded vipers. A total buzzkill.”

  “So you’re going to be our guide at the zoo,” I said, stepping off the walkway as a group of schoolkids ran past me. “I may never get another phone. If you keep me by your side day and night, I won’t need one.”

  “You and I would last side by side for about forty-eight hours. Then all your usual control-freak habits would kick in and I’d be out on the street, trolling for homicides.”

  “You know where we’re going, Alex?” Mercer asked.

  “I don’t remember my way around, but the woman who helped me with the information for Battaglia’s speech, when he was honored, was from the Development Office of the WCS—which lent a hand to Animals Without Borders,” I said. “I had to call her a good bit to get the facts right.”

  “You remember her name?” he asked.

  I laughed. “It’s in my contacts. On my phone,” I said. “It’s Deirdre—Deirdre something.”

  Mercer dialed 411 and asked for the Bronx Zoological Society. It was no longer conservation-speak to call these places “zoos.” When information put him through to the switchboard, he asked the operator for the Development Office, passing the phone to me.

  “Deirdre, please,” I said, and waited f
or the call to transfer. “Hello, Deirdre? This is Alex Cooper.”

  “Who?”

  “Alex Cooper. We’ve never met, but we’ve had a few conversations. I’m the prosecutor who worked with you on the fund-raising dinner honoring Paul Battaglia in—”

  “Oh, of course,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss—and for your, well, your own terrible—what can I say—your experience.”

  “Thank you for your condolences,” I said. “In fact, I’m calling about the district attorney.”

  “Really?” Deirdre asked. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “There is, actually,” I said. “Just unofficially. I mean, I’m not asking as a prosecutor. There won’t be a memorial service for the district attorney for weeks, maybe months. But I thought it would bring such a personal element to the event if I could start to organize some of the speakers around the things he cared about most. Maybe bring in some of the people from your world that we don’t even know about.”

  “To contribute to our fund in his honor?”

  That, too, I thought, although it hadn’t been on my mind. Most of the staff would donate to our favorite advocacy group—Safe Horizon—in his memory, but this would be a fine tribute and a cause we could all respect. “Certainly.”

  “That’s so generous of you,” Deirdre said. “I’d need to pull my files, of course. When would you like to talk?”

  “Meet. I’d like to meet with you.”

  “That’s fine. Why don’t you give me some dates that suit you?”

  “How would this afternoon work?”

  Deirdre chuckled. “I like fund-raisers with a sense of urgency. But we’re up in the Bronx, you know? It’s not like I’m around the corner.”

  “Yes, that’s what reminded me of you,” I said. “Coincidentally, I’m just a few blocks away, at Fordham, with a couple of my friends.”

  “Fordham?”

  “Yes—um—we were, uh, exploring the chapel there as a possible site for the service. You know it has those gorgeous windows that were made in France, intended for the original Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”